All INTANGIBLE ASSETS Articles

U.S. accounting rule makers are being urged to take up projects that would aim to coordinate and simplify corporate financial statements and overhaul U.S. rules in areas such as hedging, pensions and measurement of intangible assets.

Such accounting topics could be the first major projects the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board takes on following a decade of convergence work with international accounting standard setters.

Corporate auditors must increasingly adjust their approach to handle corporate financial statements that are now dominated by estimates and valuations of assets, Public Company Accounting Oversight Board member Jay Hanson said on Friday.

In a speech posted to the PCAOB website Friday, Mr. Hanson said estimates and measurements are one of the most frequently identified trouble spots by the U.S. auditor watchdog, as managers and accountants have to spend more time focusing on the fair value of financial instruments, goodwill impairments and intangible assets in the new economy.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development will likely urge some of the biggest changes to global tax policy in the last two decades when it releases new guidelines about taxing how business gets done on the internet.

Since at least the 1900s, and more formally since the 1950s, corporate tax policy around the world has focused on where companies are physically earning their profits, but today it is often unclear where corporate profit centers are, Olivier Vergniolle, a partner at advisory firm Taxand said at a conference sponsored by his firm in New York this week.

Governments should focus on enforcing laws already the books that govern the way large multinational companies move profits between high and low tax countries before writing new legislation, a U.S. Treasury tax official said Thursday.

But while legislators in many countries, including the U.S., are interested in changing the rules to keep more profits at home, any effort to do that should start with better enforcement, Robert Stack, Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Tax Affairs in the Office of Tax Policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, said at a global tax conference organized by advisory firm Taxand in New York on Thursday.

Intangible assets such as intellectual property, technology processes and copyrights have grown over the past decade to account for a greater portion of corporate profits, and tax regulators are taking notice. Companies have increasingly used so-called transfer pricing to shift profits stemming from these assets to low-tax countries, according to an OECD report.

In his 38-page letter to shareholders on Wednesday night , J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon explains why the largest U.S. bank plans to keep buying back its stock, but says increases in the company’s share price and bank capital requirements will limit its buybacks in the future.

Chief financial officers should be paying closer attention to non-financial drivers of their business, which could be more valuable over the long term, according to a global survey of chief executives on Tuesday. “In the longer-term management of the company the non-financial data plays a bigger role than the financial data,” Gary Kabureck, Chief Accounting Officer at Xerox, told CFO Journal.

TiVo CEO Tom Rogers says he’s noticed the recent pandemonium over patents and wants to make sure the set-top box maker is making the most of its own IP treasure trove.

Taking his cue from the battle over Nortel’s 6,000-plus patents and Google’s $12.5 billion patent-inspired bid for Motorola Mobility, Rogers said TiVo would increase its focus on its patent portfolio and look into options for boosting its value. The company has 210 patents and 389 pending patent applications, he said.